


cut the lights and pray that you're dead

by doctorkaitlyn



Series: tumblr fics & ficlets, part ii. [45]
Category: Hemlock Grove
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Biting, Blood, Complicated Relationships, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Timeline What Timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-06-11 17:18:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15320376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorkaitlyn/pseuds/doctorkaitlyn
Summary: “I know what you’re doing.” Waving a hand between them, Peter says, “I know whatthisis. You’re a fucking idiot.”“Doesn’t that make you an idiot for being part of it?” Roman responds, idly thumbing at the blood dried around Peter’s mouth.“Probably.” He goes silent again; Roman can practically see the gears of his brain spinning in place. “But if you keep this up, one day, shewillkill you. That’s whattheydo, Roman.”He saysthey, but what Roman hears isyou.





	cut the lights and pray that you're dead

**Author's Note:**

> I was asked to write some more Roman/Peter shenanigans, and here we are! in addition to the tags, the typical Hemlock Grove warnings (i.e., these two being fucking assholes and Roman having a weird relationship with his mother) all apply.
> 
> title from [The Ballad Of Resurrection Joe And Rosa Whore](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKls6avjbuY) by Rob Zombie.

In addition to the social standing and wealth and unmistakable thirst for blood that starts to sink in at sixteen, being born a Godfrey comes with a long list of rules to follow. Unspoken though they are, by the time he’s seventeen, Roman can recite the most important of them by rote:

**1)** Do not do anything to embarrass the family name.

**2)** Never take blood from someone you actually care for.

**3)** Do not sully yourself by associating with werewolves.

Roman’s never been much one for abiding by rules. Not ones created by people, at least; the rules of the universe, the laws of numerology and symmetry, are different. The thought of not following those fills him with a dread as thick and dark as tar.

But rules dreamed up by school trustees with too much time on their hands and fat cops and ancient members of the board of directors? Those are more suggestions than anything, suggestions that he ignores at will.

The rules his mother has tried to whip into him since he was old enough to understand language and his station in his life? Those rules are made to be shattered into the smallest of pieces, until all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put them together again.

Which is where Peter comes in. 

Peter, who is really nothing more than a street rat who spouts bullshit philosophy at every turn and answers any question given to him in class with a wisecrack (if he answers at all).

Peter, who makes Shelley smile by juggling whatever is around him, who never fails to have extra cigarettes to share, whose tiny trailer in the woods felt more like home after one visit than Roman’s mansion ever has.

Peter, who sheds his own skin in exceedingly gory, spectacularly beautiful fashion on the full moon of every month, who howls at the sky and licks at Roman’s hand before he runs into the trees.

If there was ever a person who was so thoroughly a walking violation of every one of Olivia Godfrey’s precious rules, it’s Peter, and Roman is fairly certain that, if what they’re doing now _doesn’t_ perfectly shatter every one of those rules, then nothing is going to.

There’s a party going on downstairs, understated by Godfrey standards, which means there’s only three hundred people spread across the ground floor of the mansion, being entertained by a string quartet and fed by a small army of tuxedoed servers carrying shining trays of hors d'oeuvres. The overlapping noise of the party is drifting up through the floorboards, filling the walls of Roman’s room like so much static. Occasionally, something breaks through, a sharp laugh or applause as the quartet finishes a song, but otherwise, it remains a background hum that’s easy enough to simply tune out.

Roman had been in the thick of it for approximately fifteen minutes. He’d obediently donned a suit, downed two glasses of champagne that bubbled down his throat, and floated around the edge of the crowd, doing his best to avoid being sucked into conversation whilst waiting for his phone to vibrate against his thigh. Moments after he grabbed a crab cake and jammed it in his mouth, a member of the board had stopped him to ask what his plans for the future were, a veiled way of asking if he was going to step into the position of CEO or let the company stay the course.

At that moment, Roman’s phone had vibrated, and he had plucked the man’s glass of champagne from his slack fingers.

“My plans for the _immediate_ future? Well, first I’m going to go get fucked by my boyfriend, and then I’ll probably have a cigarette. After that, the possibilities are endless.” After draining the glass, he’d popped it back into the man’s hand before he shoved through the crowd to the kitchen to let Peter in through the side door. Getting upstairs had required going back through the crowd, where Peter’s vaguely unkempt hair and half-unbuttoned shirt and the cigarette tucked behind his ear stood out as clearly as if someone had rendered them in neon.

Roman didn’t see his mother in the time it took them to cross the main foyer and go up to his bedroom, but he’s sure that by now, she’s heard all about it in excruciating detail. 

His jacket and shirt are in a crumpled heap on the floor, discarded like trash in the gutter. Aside from his threadbare boxers with their sagging elastic, Peter’s clothes have been equally discarded, and he’s slumped against the headboard with a joint jutting from his lips. Smoke is curling towards the ceiling, and ash is falling down into his chest hair, dusting it like snow. Roman is astride his lap, fiddling with a razor blade, trying to decide where he wants to cut himself first. When his grip slips, he tears open a shallow divot in his thumb, and he brings it to his mouth and sucks it dry as he glances over at the door, which is closed but not locked.

“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Peter asks. After taking another hit off the joint, he exhales a series of smoke rings directly into Roman’s face. “Because I can rip your throat out for free, if you want.” He reaches out and drags one rough, calloused thumb down the length of Roman’s throat, taps it sharply against his pulse. 

“You can leave if you’re scared,” Roman answers. Peter snorts and takes another hit.

“I’m not scared of your mother, Roman,” he says, leaning up and unceremoniously jamming the joint between Roman’s lips. Roman suspects that Peter isn’t being entirely truthful about that; over the past few months, he’s come to learn that while Peter does an excellent job at putting up a blustery, devil-may-care front, it’s nothing more than that: a front, designed to keep people from getting too close, from finding out the truth. 

The truth being that there’s a _lot_ that Peter’s afraid of: cages (in whatever kind of form they might take), commitment, upirs, the pull of the moon at his skin, the possibility that he’ll wake one morning with human flesh between his teeth.

They’re not exactly stupid things to be afraid of. Roman is willing to concede that point.

But he’s _not_ willing to tell Peter that. 

Instead, he takes a deep pull from the joint, sucks the smoke down into the depths of his lungs, before he leans over and grinds it out on his mahogany bedside table. 

“Whatever. Are you going to fuck me or not?”

“Are you going to cut yourself or not?” Peter throws back as he starts working on the button of Roman’s trousers. “Or are _you_ scared?”

Roman immediately recognizes the words as the goad they are, but that doesn’t stop them from slapping him across the face.

“Fuck you,” he spits before he raises his hand and unthinkingly slashes his own cheekbone open. Instantaneously, blood begins to pour down his face in a sheet, drips onto Peter’s chest and onto the bed. Peter’s eyes widen as he reaches up to roughly thumb at the wound.

“Jesus, what the-”

Roman grabs Peter’s thumb and licks it clean of his own blood. Each drop singes the lining of his throat like a coal.

“Now will you fuck me, you asshole?” He means to snap, but it’s hard to sound pissed off when he’s so hard that it aches.

Peter’s eyes momentarily flicker the yellow of a traffic light, and he surges upward and knocks Roman onto his back, head dangling over the edge of the bed. Before he can prop himself on his elbows, the flow of blood reverses and comes very close to trickling into his eye.

“You have a death wish,” Peter mutters, yanking both Roman’s pants and briefs off before he tosses them across the room.

“I told you, you can leave if you’re too much of a pussy,” Roman replies, hooking his fingers into the waistband of Peter’s boxers and shoving them down as far as he can reach before Peter sits back on his knees and finishes the job.

“Someone has to stop you from killing yourself.” Peter scrabbles around in Roman’s bedside table before he finds a bottle of lube and shoves the drawer closed hard enough for an empty water glass to fall to the floor and shatter.

“It’s cute that you care.” Roman doesn’t know where the words come from, probably some corner of his mind that is determined to keep him from possessing anything or anyone that isn’t sharp and barbed at the edges, but he keeps talking. “Does this mean we’re going steady now? Do you want to go to prom with-”

Peter lunges forward and sinks his blunt teeth into the base of Roman’s throat, and all of Roman’s other barbs die in the back of his mouth.

When Peter leans back up and shoves Roman’s legs up towards his chest, there’s fresh blood smeared in the stubble around his mouth.

“You done?” he asks, pouring lube on his fingers before he drops the bottle on Roman’s stomach.

“For now,” Roman concedes, not because he wants to stop pushing (maybe he could make Peter’s fangs drop if he tried hard enough), but because he _really_ wants to get back to flagrantly breaking all of his mother’s rules, which kind of requires Peter’s dick to be inside him. His cheek is covered in tacky blood, and he idly prods at the cut so that it starts flowing again. The razor blade has been lost somewhere in the sheets, but that’s not a problem. If he needs more, he’ll just bite into his own wrist.

Or get Peter to do it. Whatever is more convenient at the time. 

“Good. You talk too fucking much.”

Roman wants to object to that, but when Peter presses two of his fingers into him, he decides that now isn’t the time.

Besides, it probably won’t be the last time Peter says it to him.

By the time Peter _finally_ starts fucking him, after what feels like a small eternity spent working him open with three of his blunt fingers, Roman’s just about ready to punch him out of sheer frustration. When Peter’s hips start rocking forward, Roman transfers that urge into fisting his fingers into Peter’s dangling hair and pulling him down closer. Peter’s hands are painfully tight on Roman’s thighs, and he hopes that there will be bruises there when all is said and done, darkened fingerprints that he can prod until they turn purple and yellow and eventually vanish. That tight grip keeps him in position, keeps Peter’s thrusts from moving him towards the end of the bed in increments, and Roman can’t help but laugh, just once, sharply, as he thinks of his mother’s third rule.

_Do not sully yourself by associating with werewolves._

He hasn’t looked at a dictionary in a long time, but if this doesn’t count as being sullied, he doesn’t know what does.

Peter isn’t silent, but he _is_ quieter than usual. There’s no containing his panting breath, but no groans leave his mouths, no moans of Roman’s name that border on growls. His eyes keep flicking in the direction of the door, and even though Roman doesn’t exactly blame him, the gesture makes something flare red-hot in his chest, something like anger for Peter daring to be distracted, for not being fully present in the room with him.

So he leans up on his elbows, nearly bends himself in half, and bites down on Peter’s bottom lip, until hot copper fills his own mouth.

_That_ gets a groan out of Peter.

“What the _fuck_ , asshole,” he hisses, tonguing at his split lip as he drives his hips forward harder, hard enough for Roman’s breath to hitch. When Roman licks at the wound, their tongues touch.

“Is that the best you’ve got?” Roman goads, ignoring the ache in his back from staying in such an awkward position. Peter’s eyes flicker again, and he shoves at Roman’s sternum until he falls back against the mattress. A rivulet of blood trickles down his chin as he thrusts harder, and Roman can’t help but grin even as he scrabbles for the edge of the mattress so that he has some leverage to push back. Peter looks wild, like he just crawled out of the woods after the transformation; his hair is a tangled mess, his eyes are golden, and there’s blood streaking his mouth and chest. When his nails dig into Roman’s thighs, they feel decidedly sharper than they should.

He’s beautiful like this.

The words slip from Roman’s mouth of their own accord, and Peter’s lips curve into something too soft to be a smirk and too sharp to be a smile.

“Does this mean we’re going steady now?” he asks, throwing Roman’s words from earlier right back into his face like a punch. He punctuates them with a particularly sharp thrust, and Roman nearly chokes on a groan as he throws his head back so that it’s dangling over the edge of the mattress.

“Fuck off.” Peter just laughs before he transfers one hand from Roman’s thigh to his cock. He isn’t gentle about it, immediately matches the pace of his thrusts, and it’s too much, too much friction, but Roman comes almost immediately, stripes his own stomach and Peter’s fingers, doesn’t restrain the yell that bursts forth from his lungs. 

He has no doubt that the yell was audible downstairs, and a satisfied grin spreads across his face. Gossip travels fast in Hemlock Grove - it’s probably only a matter of a day or so before the whole town knows what he was up while his mother tried to save face. 

Peter wipes his hand off on Roman’s chest and doesn’t miss a beat, keeps up the pace until, with a low growl, his hips stutter once, twice, three times and freeze, flush with Roman’s. When he pulls out, leaving Roman achingly empty, he goes back to the head of the bed, grabs a cigarette and lighter, and flops back down heavily beside Roman, hard enough to make the mattress squeak.

They don’t talk while they pass the cigarette back and forth, staring up at the ceiling. There’s come drying on Roman’s stomach and blood plastered to his face and chin, and he knows that even once he’s had a shower, his mother will know. The blood-spattered sheets in his hamper and the cut on his cheekbone, a cut he has no plans on covering up while it heals, will be evidence enough.

Once the cigarette has burned down to the filter, Peter leans over the edge of the bed and grinds it out into the hardwood floor before he turns his head to look at Roman.

“I know what you’re doing.” Waving a hand between them, he says, “I know what _this_ is. You’re a fucking idiot.”

“Doesn’t that make you an idiot for being part of it?” Roman responds, idly thumbing at the blood dried around Peter’s mouth.

“Probably.” He goes silent again; Roman can practically see the gears of his brain spinning in place. “But if you keep this up, one day, she _will_ kill you. That’s what _they_ do, Roman.”

He says _they_ , but what Roman hears is _you_.

“Well,” he says, trying to swallow down a hot spike of rage, “guess it’s a good thing you’re not afraid of her, right?”

Peter doesn’t answer that. Instead, he rolls off the bed to grab his boxers and another cigarette, which he lights after he sinks back down to sit on the edge of the mattress. As Roman looks at his back, at his shifting muscles and the ridge of his spine, he finds himself thinking about the rules again. 

**1)** Do not do anything to embarrass the family name.

**2)** Never take blood from someone you actually care for.

**3)** Do not sully yourself by associating with werewolves.

In the past, he’s only ever thought about how they affected him, about what might happen to _himself_ if he violated them. Even then, the consequences had been trivial; what mattered more was the simple _delight_ of humiliating his mother. 

But now, as Peter’s continued silence fills the room and sucks the oxygen out, Roman can’t help but wonder. 

If he embarrasses the family name, what happens to the embarrassment?

If he takes blood from someone he cares about, someone who makes his sister smile and sometimes just stares at him like he’s woken from a dream, what happens to that person? 

If he sullies himself with a werewolf, what, he wonders as he reaches out to drag his fingers down the notches of Peter’s spine, will happen to the werewolf?

**Author's Note:**

> as always, I can be found on [tumblr.](http://banshee-cheekbones.tumblr.com/) :)


End file.
